[TriLUG] even more interesting

[Matt Jezorek]

> You're going to have to explain this to me. IMHO, those responsible for
> making the pc affordable was mostly IBM, who "open sourced" all the
> hardware schematics and BIOS code for the original PC, creating the clone
> market, which has given us commodity PC hardware. It's this intense
> competition in the hardware market that's really made things cheap.
> Intel's invention of the micro-processor and discovery of "Moore's Law" is
> the frosting on the cake

Yes this is true, the IBM clone did alot of this work as well but what was
distributed on them.
MS DOS was easier to use then Unix at the time. Unix was running on the
mainframes and this and that.
Now mind you IBM had a DOS too. But IBM DOS  was not as big in my eyes as
far as usage.  Do you
think that if DOS was not invented, or any of the MS products where invented
would the desktop market
be as big as it is today? We (the consumer) would be stuck with Unix or OS2
i believe it was and I dont think
the desktop market would be as big.



> When MS started, the OS was always included for free with a computer.
> Microsoft has pioneered the OS as main profit center. Their constant
> increase in cost of the OS (how much is XP now) along with continuous
> mandatory upgrades seems to me to have driven up the price of a PC, not
> reduced it.

I am saying that they helped push the pc to the desktop. Back in the day
when
Microsoft was a small company before they stole Apples code (in that time
era)
Not today.

> Of course, the bundling of the OS and Office by OEM's seems free to
> consumers, and that give the impression of cheaper computing, but there
> ain't no such thing as a free lunch. You certainly are paying for this "PC
> tax".

But who are we talking about. We are talking about consumers. In the
consumers eyes
they are getting a cheaper PC.

>

Matt

P.S. like I said sure would have been marked Flamebait